Weekend grinding

I spent several hours this last weekend grinding out my remaining apexis dailies for the Defending Draenor achievement and looking for treasures to get to the required 100, all so as to have done everything I can do for the Draenor Pathfinder achievement prior to 6.2. It was not a horrible grind, but I was glad when it was done.

I had a lot of apexis dailies to do, having only done 4 of the 12 previously. The Scouting Missives you can buy for 200 garrison resources apiece from your garrison vendor were a life saver for me. The only one you can’t buy is Assault on the Pit, but I had already done that one. Buying the missives means you don’t have to wait for each daily to pop up randomly. And they are easy quests — none of them took longer than 15 minutes for me to solo on my hunter, although I think healer classes without a damage off spec might have more trouble. I did notice some people posting custom groups in the Group Finder, though, and some of them were for multiple apexis dailies. I did not join any big groups, but I did party up once with a player who was also grinding the same area I was in. I would have grouped up more given the opportunity, but I seemed to be the only one in most of the quest areas. All told, I was done with the achievement in a little over two hours.

The treasures were a lot harder for me. I started out with 41, the number I had gotten by the time I leveled my hunter. I had not been big on finding treasures while leveling, mainly because I determined early on that the reward did not begin to justify the time cost to get them. So if I did not literally stumble on them as I was leveling, I made no effort to seek them out.

I am embarrassed to admit it took me close to 6 hours to get my remaining 59. Part of this was due to a tactical error I made by starting in Nagrand. The treasures there are, almost without exception, enormously frustrating and time-intensive to find and get to, even with a map and the addon. I know some of you like doing these kinds of puzzles, and the more intricate the better. But I detest them. I spent close to 2 hours trying to find goblin rocket NPCs, in order to get fired up into an area where I could ride around and find a goblin glider, which was close to impossible to control, resulting in me crashing and not getting the treasure, causing me to have to ride a long ways to get back to the rocket guy to get blasted up to the area where I could once again gallop to the glider guy so that I could miss the treasure yet again and start all over.

This is not my idea of fun. This is Sisyphus in game hell. Take my advice, if you are just looking to knock out your required 100 treasures and are not masochistically inclined (not that there’s anything wrong with that …), do not set foot in Nagrand. If you look at a map you will be tempted to go there, because it looks like there are lots and lots of treasures scattered all around in the zone, and you will think “Aha! Easy pickings!” But you will be wrong, it is a trap. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

At any rate, once I came to my senses and abandoned Nagrand, the treasure hunting went much faster. It still took me another 3 hours to get to 100. This is due to my navigational ineptness, true, but it is also due to the twisted zone design that makes it impossible in many instances to find paths through obstacles even though it may look like there is a path on the map, or the graphics indicate there is a path. You may even get quite a ways along the apparent path only to discover it is a blind alley, and then you get to go back and start again, enjoying what Ion Hazzikostas would term “engaging, immersive fun.”

Once I got to 100, I stopped. I did not try to go on and get to 200, which is the current achievement requirement. I took Blizz at its word and believed they would give credit for 100 treasures as part of the Pathfinder achievement. (If they pull a Charlie Brown and Lucy football move on this one, I will quit this game, no ifs ands or buts about it.)

Speaking of Blizz and Hazzikostas, I did watch the Q&A on Saturday. It was not as bad as I was expecting, but it was not anything to rave about either. I thought it was very scripted, even the “brutally honest” comments such as the declaration that Blizz is intentionally nerfing demo locks into the ground because it’s time for them to be on the bottom for awhile. I thought that came off as a planned mechanism for demonstrating how sincere and open Blizz was being.

I don’t play a demo lock, so I was only partially interested in the comment, but it made me wonder if that is also their reason for what they are doing to SV hunters. Do they think “it’s time” for them to suck also? Because it seems like that suck rotation is a pretty rapid one, since SV hunters also sucked for quite a while at the beginning of WoD.

The only other thing that sort of got my attention was his comment that the reason they remained silent on the subject of flying for so long after the “no fly ever again” announcement was because there was still no consensus on the subject within Blizz. If this is true, then why in hell did they announce what sounded very much like a final decision? Was Hazzikostas going rogue? Was it a trial balloon? Is there a management coup in progress? Are they just that incompetent? I don’t know, and honestly don’t care much, but it just struck me as an illogical statement.

Overall, he didn’t address many class balance issues, and I would have been interested in hearing more about that. Even though the Q&A was highly scripted, I did think it was useful. I think Blizz could go a long ways towards improving its bad communication image by having regular Q&A sessions, say once a month, instead of waiting for the forums to blow up in outrage before they have one. They could even specialize them, talk about one class each month, or have Holinka talk about PvP on one, talk about raid philosophy on one, that kind of thing.

2 Responses to Weekend grinding

I was shocked when Ion told Lore that he was doing it wrong by playing a healing priest. Said it twice with no qualifiers, disc or die. He also said every raid team needs a disc priest — just how horrible is the healing design right now!!!
I’ll keep saying it: it was said that the Draenor template of completing everything before we get flying is the standard. If this suggests that we’ll get no flying content nor flying specific zones then I cry “bullshit”. Why the community didn’t push on it was the euphoria of getting flying, I guess. But, it seems to me, that by the time we get flying in WoD, the expansion is over.

Yeah, I agree with you about the priest comment. I guess I was trying to believe that Ion’s comment was what you get when you try to script humor, because as I said the whole thing seemed very rehearsed and canned to me. But there is no doubt that the entire healing design is terrible, and I say that from my limited vantage point as an alt mistweaver. Which is why I said I would love for them to do a series of Q&A sessions, focusing on some of these larger problems with inter- and intra- class balance.

And yes, I do think there is a better than even chance that the expansion is close to over, even though Ion has said 6.2 is not the last patch. But I suspect the next patch will be the pre-xpac one. Honestly, I say the sooner this terrible xpac is over the better, but you bring up an interesting point about the flying timing. I wonder if the new paradigm is for flying only to be for old content, with no more real flying content, just a kind of “Oh, alRIGHT, you can have flying back but only for the end of any expansion.” Which would be sad imo.